Country diary

There were, in a sense, two brambles in a single bush. The bramble of the eye and nose was a honey-scented globe encircled by what looked like shelves of rose blossom. Then there was the bramble of touch, a squat laager of hook-tipped spines, whose crimson bases seem to anticipate bloodshed. By the time I'd finished my legs were scribbled across the shins and knees with red wheals.

Hundreds of insects created around the bush a soothing aura of low buzzing; almost like the scent of bramble converted to sound. There were at least five species of bee, the carder, red-tailed, buff-tailed and garden bumblebees, as well as honeybees. Far too busy to worry about the alien among them, they were so close that through my hand lens the pollen sacs hanging from their hind legs reminded me of a ball and chain. If it suggested a life of labour and duress, however, it was the pleasant form of incarceration.

Each bramble flower is centred with about 200 long white filaments topped by dark grain-like anthers. The bees truffled through and around these tangled skeins of the plant's sexual parts as if to immerse themselves in its luxuriance. Some carder bees, which normally have a lovely gingery thorax and abdomen, were so dusted with pollen they looked the colour of set honey themselves. I came across one old worker that was clearly about to expire. Its worn and tatty body was clamped right across a whole petal, its face buried in the heart of the bloom. It looked like a bumblebee's ideal of death.

As the bees and I went about our shared business, I noticed a third form of bramble in the bush, the bramble of taste, and in those hard green fruits I sensed the cold golden light of autumn mornings at summer's heart.